Updated
First published
by: Torbjørn Tyridal

The Ubuntu 14.04 shipped gstreamer vaapi leaves a lot to be desired (eg hardware encoding)

Here presented is a binary build (amd64) of git://gitorious.org/vaapi/gstreamer-vaapi.git sha1: e4ed64b7313fb8f5199b312852ecef2b3f238c15 (0.7.1pre1) and tag 0.5.8.
You might also want VAAPI library and driver binaries

This package will enable command lines like: 

gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=test.mp4 ! qtdemux ! vaapidecode \! 
vaapipostproc width=320 force_aspect_ratio=true ! vaapiencode_h264 \! 
qtmux ! filesink location=res.mp4
To transcode and scale a file with the gpu hardware. This is significantly faster than software pipes and eg ffmpeg

Additionally the following patch is applied: (only 0.5.8) 

diff --git a/gst/vaapi/gstvaapi.c b/gst/vaapi/gstvaapi.c
index 34358b8..e242134 100644
--- a/gst/vaapi/gstvaapi.c
+++ b/gst/vaapi/gstvaapi.c
@@ -51,7 +51,7 @@ plugin_init (GstPlugin *plugin)
                          GST_TYPE_VAAPIUPLOAD);
 #endif
     gst_element_register(plugin, "vaapidecode",
-                         GST_RANK_PRIMARY,
+                         GST_RANK_PRIMARY+1,
                          GST_TYPE_VAAPIDECODE);
     gst_element_register(plugin, "vaapipostproc",
                          GST_RANK_PRIMARY,
This will make decodebin / playbin et al prefer vaapi decoders above software decoders when both are available.

Steps to reproduce: 

git clone git://gitorious.org/vaapi/gstreamer-vaapi.git
cd gstreamer-vaapi
./autogen.sh
make
make deb.upstream

Version 0.7.1.pre1 files:

0.5.8-1 files: